We live in a society today that is saturated with cameras. From government-owned surveillance camera networks to privately-owned store and home security cameras to the literally billions of cellphone and standalone cameras standing ready to capture the world at a moment’s notice, the modern world is blanketed with digital eyes. This all-encompassing recording network was supposed to ensure that we could see everything happening everywhere. Ordinary citizens could experience spontaneous events as they happen through the eyes of its participants and witnesses, eliminating biased narratives and gatekeepers to understand the “truth” about what really happened. Governments could similarly watch every square inch of their nations to prevent crime and terrorism. With more cameras than citizens, why do governments still find themselves unable to catch criminals and why do we as a society still struggle to define the “truth” about what really happened in major societal events?
One of the greatest falsehoods about photography and videography that we as a society perpetuate is that cameras capture “truth.”
This could not be further from the truth.
Cameras are not societal capturing devices that somehow absorb the space around them and recreate it.
Cameras are much like any form of art: they construct reality rather than capture it.
A photographer decides where to point their camera and the framing to use. The same scene can yield many very different stories depending on how each photographer decided to capture it.
In one famous pair of war images, one country’s press ran the photograph of a child’s toy in the kitchen of her home, covered with her blood from the airstrike by the opposing side that killed her. The image portrayed the very real civilian cost of war being borne by that country. In contrast, the other country’s press carried a photograph of the same kitchen, from the same vantage point, but pointing in the opposite direction, showing that the house had been turned into a militant bomb factory – the rest of the kitchen filled with IEDs, weapons and the remains of heavily armed militants that had been preparing a major terrorist attack, with no external indication of the home-turned-military-base that there had been a child present.
Images do not capture “truth,” they merely construct one possible reality and narrative.
The filters and color adjustments to an image can have a tremendous effect on how it makes us feel. An image of a city street that has been darkened, its colors stripped of their saturation and its shadows deepened, can relay an ominous narrative. The same image that has been brightened, its colors saturated to neon purity and its shadows lifted away, can relay a story of a bright and optimistic outcome.
Most importantly, photographers decide when to capture their images, while videographers decide the precise starting and stopping points for their video to bear witness to a scene.
Why is it in a world awash with cameras we still disagree on what happened in major events?
Whether a police shooting or a group of children on a school outing confronted by two separate groups of aggressive adults, the images and video that emerge from a contested situation will often tell very different stories about what took place.
Initial visual evidence will typically be the most incendiary, portraying a side of the confrontation that can only possibly indicate one single terrible underlying cause. Over time, the vast array of perspectives between those two narratives will emerge, as other images and videos muddy the waters and fill in the gaps between the two polar opposite realities. What at first glance seemed a cut and dried story based on irrefutable visual evidence suddenly becomes a complex scene of interpretation in which any number of possible stories may be supported.
The problem is that social media rewards the former, while drawing our attention away from the latter. In the aftermath of any major event, it is the initial incendiary imagery that goes viral and dominates our societal conversation, while our attention turns away to the next big story long before the remaining imagery emerges that tells a far more nuanced story.
Therein lies the great challenge in our visual world: we believe that photographs don’t “lie” and that “data” captures irrefutable “truth." In turn, social media ensures our attention moves on before we are exposed to other perspectives.
Just as a spreadsheet of numbers can be used to support any conclusion if properly filtered, so too can photos and videos support any possible interpretation of an event.
Putting this all together, perhaps the most important lesson we as a society have yet to learn is that as social media becomes increasingly multimedia, there is the temptation to equate visual renditions with “photographic proof.” The truth is that we don’t witness events through photographs. We witness one possible constructed reality of those events through the eyes of individuals telling stories and portraying their own narrative and interpretation of what they see. Just as written descriptions don't represent an exclusive reality, neither does the visual world.
In the end, our camera-saturated world was supposed to bring us closer to one single universal "truth." In reality, it has only driven us apart to our many different "truths," while social media has ensured we remain safely within our filter bubbles, rarely exposed to the other side.
